Japanese Literature Summaries
日本語

Twenty-Four Eyes — Summary and Characters

Miss Ōishi and her twelve pupils

Author
Tsuboi Sakae
Published
February 1952
First appeared in
New Age
Form
Novel
Genres
  • Social
  • Psychological
Setting
  • Kagawa
Length
113,444 characters
Reading time
About 3 hr 47 min
Orthography
Modern script and kana

About this work

In 1928 a young woman, Miss Ōishi, arrives to teach at the branch school of a small cape village on the Inland Sea. She comes on a bicycle and in Western clothes — "the lady teacher" — and takes charge of twelve first-year pupils. Days full of the pleasure of knowing one another and growing up are swallowed, in time, by the age of war. Through the bond between a teacher and her pupils, Tsuboi Sakae's enduring work makes a quiet, deep case for how much the war took away.

Summary

In April of the third year of Shōwa, a young woman teacher comes to the branch school of a small cape village on the Inland Sea. Miss Ōishi — "the lady teacher" — rides in from the town on a bicycle and wears Western clothes, and though the old-fashioned villagers look at her as something strange, she opens a bright and honest understanding with the twelve first-graders in her charge. Then one day she hurts her foot in a prank of the children's and has to go back to her house in the distant town to recover. The scene in which the twelve small children, longing to see her, walk the whole long road to visit her is the loveliest passage in the book. Before long she marries and leaves the cape village, but the tie with her pupils is not broken. Time passes, the children grow, and the world tilts toward war. A girl sent out to service because her family is poor, a child bound to the family trade, and the boys taken for soldiers — some killed, some coming home with their sight gone. One by one the twenty-four eyes of long ago are scattered by the rough seas of the age. After the defeat, Miss Ōishi stands again at the teacher's desk in the same village, and the pupils who have survived gather around her for a reunion. When Isokichi, blinded in the war, "looks" at a commemorative photograph by tracing his classmates' faces with his fingers, teacher and pupils alike are in tears. Through the pure affection between a teacher and her children it draws, quietly, the preciousness of peace and the cruelty of war; filmed as well, it has been widely loved, and is Tsuboi Sakae's best-known work.

Characters

Chapter-by-chapter synopsis

The app covers this work chapter by chapter (full text in the app).

  1. 1. About This Work
  2. 2. Main Characters
  3. 3. Major Supporting Characters
  4. 4. April the Fourth, 1928 — The Teacher on a Bicycle
  5. 5. The Pitfall, and the Eight-Kilometer Road
  6. 6. Four Years On — Fifth Grade at the Main School
  7. 7. Grass Seeds, and Twelve Roads Ahead
  8. 8. The Day of the Conscription Examination
  9. 9. What the War Took
  10. 10. The Cape After Eighteen Years, and the Welcome Party
  11. 11. Key Motifs and Foreshadowing

The opening (original text)

If ten years make one age ago, then the beginning of this story lies two and a half ages back. As for what was happening in the world, the rules of election had been changed, a universal suffrage law had come into being, and the first election under it had been held in February; this was two months later. On the fourth of April in the third year of Shōwa, a young woman teacher came to take up a post in a poor village on the Inland Sea shore — a place to which the words farming, mountain and fishing village all applied equally well.

Twenty-Four Eyes by Tsuboi Sakae (Aozora Bunko)

The ending (original text)

A line of tears ran down the cheek of the teacher, who was keeping time with them in a bright voice. In the hush that followed, Sanae rose abruptly to her feet. Masuno, who had been drinking, was leaning alone against the railing, singing. Spring, and the flower-viewing feast in the high tower, the circling wine cups catching the light Masuno sang with her eyes closed, as though lost in her own beautiful voice. It was the song she had sung as a solo, the last item on the program at the school entertainment in her sixth year, and it had made her popular. Sanae threw her arms around Masuno's back and burst into sobs.

Twenty-Four Eyes by Tsuboi Sakae (Aozora Bunko)

Read the original

The original Japanese text is available at Aozora Bunko, and the app downloads the same text for its vertical-text reader.

Aozora Bunko library card

Related works